This specification generally relates to selectively encrypting commit log entries in a distributed database system.
In database systems, operations that change data (e.g., writes) may be performed on copies of the data that are stored in a high speed, volatile storage (e.g., random access memory (RAM)). This may be done to improve performance by avoiding accessing slower, persistent storage (e.g., disk) every time data is changed. The database system may keep a record of the operations performed on the data in a log file, and the copies of the data in volatile storage may be written to persistent storage at regular intervals in a process referred to as checkpointing.